2005-07-29

Towards a Christian Socialism

I am a frustrated voter.

I oppose the proliferation of weapons, especially of Space-, Nuclear-, Biological- and depleted Uranium-based ones as well as other long-term and wide-spread effect weapons such as cluster bombs, butterfly bombs and land mines. I also oppose aligning Canada's foreign and defense policy with that of the US. Don't get me wrong: I like Americans. But I deeply distrust their government, their foreign policy and especially their military. The policy choices of these three have often tended, at least since 1945 or so, to be consistently foolish, more than occasionally criminally so.

I believe that responsibility for the social welfare of a country's poorest, weakest and most victimized citizens rests with that country's citizenry, morally so for its Christian believers, but also, at least to some extent with the government of that country. To that end, I support a progressive taxation system which would be used to fund broad and generous programs to maintain a reasonable level of health, safety, education, protection and empowerment for all.

On the other hand, I believe that there are some objective standards of right and wrong, which political parties who would so far agree with me are willing to treat as relative, negotiable, discardable or even barbaric. My commitment to a Christian philosophy convinces me of the moral correctness of insisting on the one hand of preferring or insisting on the use of fair-trade goods, individually and collective making a smaller consumption footprint, and striving for dependence on renewable-energy-sources just as surely as it convinces me that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.

[As an aside: I am not convinced that a government should legislate all the points that I consider part of an objective moral code (theft and murder are clearly proscribable by all; alcohol use was unenforceable and I'm not sure cannabis use will be in the long-term, either) but to call something a marriage that does not contain the basic paradox of a life-long commitment across gender lines seems too much like the intentional weakening of one of the foundation-stones of civilized society for me to roll over and accept.]

Where are the others of like mind with me? How can we forge an alliance committed to these portions of agendas present on the right and on the left but from a committed, wholistic-Christian moral philosophy, one that denounces for instance, a belief that "Fill the earth and subdue it" was a divine mandate for anything other than the responsible husbanding of our world? If nothing else had convinced me that politics contains at best only provisional answers to the problems facing humanity, and in my case, more-specifically, the population of Canada, the lack of this political alternative certainly did.

Are there any others of you out there? Is it reasonable to hope that there can be a political movement that works towards a "Christian Socialist" agenda?